Inquiries

Artist-in-Residence

This residency provides artists the opportunity to be in residence at Brandeis University while working on a significant artistic project in the field of Jewish gender studies., and to produce an exhibit for the Kniznick Gallery at the Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC) at Brandeis University. The residency will begin March 10, 2015 and be 4 - 6 weeks in length. The exhibit will coincide with or immediately follow the residency and be on view until mid-June 2015. Preference will be given to applicants who create a site-specific exhibit.

The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute presents Artist-in-Residence Milcah Bassel. Working on site at the Kniznick Gallery, Bassel will focus on large-scale drawings based on 5 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Multiplying and playing with the space between these letters will provide the basis for a multidisciplinary installation that explores space both as movement and time through an altered language.

Past Artists

The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute presents Artist-in-Residence Jeanne Williamson. Working on site at the Kniznick Gallery, Williamson will create a series of Jewish wedding canopies, or chuppot to be displayed on campus and in the gallery during the exhibition. Using simple printmaking techniques, Williamson brings pattern and color to the traditional chuppah.

The HBI is thrilled to announce the selection of Berlin-based Israeli artist Yishay Garbasz as the fifth annual Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Artist-in-Residence. Her month-long residency at the Women's Studies Research Center will culminate in a multimedia exhibition of photographs, video and text celebrating Jewish women who identify as transgender. Through interviews and portraits, Garbasz will give voice to a segment of the Jewish population that has been little discussed until recently, showing her subjects with their loved ones and families, at their jobs, or in their homes. The artist says, "By showing that these individuals are part of relationships that are familiar to us, it is the first step toward [creating] a larger, more diverse Jewish community."

2012: Sarah Zell YoungOccupy Sanhedrin

Sarah Zell Young's exhibition for the WSRC/HBI, Occupy Sanhedrin, examined roles — both religious and secular — for Jewish women from the Second Temple to the present and explored how bodies can become hazarded in the pursuit of justice. In addition to photographs, the exhibition featured a large, site-specific installation—an interactive and participatory rendition of a Sanhedrin (rabbinic supreme court). By granting access to an historical space of justice — making it physical — Young invited viewers to engage with traditional ideas and received wisdom of judicatory in a new way and to achieve personal agency over their own relationship to history. Sarah Young received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and is studying toward her MFA in combined media from Hunter College, N.Y.

Jessica Riva Cooper’s original, site-specific drawing and ceramics installation reinterpreted the folkloric stories of the Golem, a creature created to do a person’s bidding without question, and the Dybbuk, a mischievous spirit, through a feminist lens.

Acclaimed Israeli artist Andi Arnovitz created an exhibition of her recent work titled “Tear/Repair (kriah/ichooi).” As the second annual Hadassah-Brandeis Institute artist-in-residence, Arnovitz created sketches for a new body of work – a series of paper coats for Jewish women who have impacted history and changed the world. These coats are an extension of Arnovitz's "Garments of Faith" series, which were also on view. Each of these garments, fabricated from torn or intact papers, scrolls and book pages, represented injustices for Jewish women. The works addressed challenges throughout history – from halachic and spiritual issues, to those of co-existence and, above all, issues related to gender.

Words and images meld, the conceptual becomes tangible, and history met modernity in Lynne Avadenka’s site-specific installation. In spring 2008 at the Kniznick Gallery, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute hosted its first artist-in-residence in an exhibition celebrating eloquence, bravery and wit. Avadenka’s "A Thousand and One Inventions" boldly transformed the gallery’s unique architecture into a work of art. Painting, drawing and assemblage created an environment that opens up and reveals layers visually, as a book does conceptually. Unprecedented in the artist’s oeuvre in scope and scale, "A Thousand and One Inventions" expanded on the themes in Avadenka’s limited edition artist’s book, "By A Thread." Created in 2004 with a grant from the HBI, the book imagines a conversation between Queen Esther, the heroine of Purim, and Scheherazade, the teller of a thousand and one tales. Both women spoke up when they could have remained silent and saved many lives through their fortitude.